Real Names and Human Nature

Anonymity and the use of pseudonyms are as old as time. In prehistory and through the present day, people have had more than one name or even no name at all. As hard as it is to believe, before the turn of the last century most people had no passport; in 1900, one could go anywhere in the world without one. Even birth certificates came late in the 19th century, although churches have recorded births since the Middle Ages.

Why the sudden urge to track everyone and everything? What are the origins of this and how will it affect IT policies? How can IT gain enough perspective in identity to design sensible policies for customers that preserve the social value they provide?

In colonial times, people often wrote under pseudonyms due to the theocratic and regal control of law and punishment. Truthtellers were hurt and even killed on a regular basis. In 1859, The Atlantic Monthly, described Thomas Paine’s Common Sense use of pseudonyms:

[A published speech by the King] … appeared in Philadelphia on the same day as [Thomas Paine’s] Common Sense. Thus Paine was as lucky in his time of publication as in his choice of a subject. Paine himself said, `[T]he success it met with was beyond anything since the invention of printing. I gave the copyright up to every State in the Union, and the demand to not less than one hundred thousand copies. The authorship was attributed to Dr. Franklin, to Samuel Adams, and to John Adams.’” - Thomas Paine’s First Appearance in America, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, Issue 25, 1859 [Edited for clarity]

So anonymity, polynymity, and pseudonyms are time-honored traditions to aid in the expression of unfavorable points of view, to protect oneself, or to prevent exploitation. In the face of this practice, we can now look at the worldwide movement towards concrete names and identifications in broad relief, underway as it has been for some time. Its motivation – past all obfuscation - has to do with hunger for state revenue and control alongside the worn mercantilist impulse to manage outcomes in the favor of powerful interests. Unpleasant yes, but it is the unvarnished truth.

Why is Real Names a Problem?

People have different avatars for the various aspects of their lives. People are multi-faceted. They have their families and communities, their professional associations, their clubs and sports teams. In other words, there is more than one version of you, a multiplicity of contexts that give expression to human uniqueness. The Internet today reflects this fact with people using a variety of identifiers to each facet of their personal diamond. Freedom of identity is the core of spiritual freedom, which allows for our multifaceted self to evolve and change. If fluidity of identity is undermined, the sense of freedom that powers creativity dries up. And evidence is everywhere that the oppression of consciousness dries a society up. With this in mind, let’s turn to Real Names and other approaches like it.

Real Names is an ad hoc registration service. It creates the risk of a technological internal exile. It is opposed to multifacetism, the soul of creative minds. It vastly increases the risk of damage in the event that facets kept from public view are revealed. It crosses the wires of multifacetism and destroys freedom of expression.

What better way to crush truth telling on the Internet than to eliminate the Guy Fawkes mask of anonymity or polynymity? What better way to raise the price of freedom and make for easier retribution than to uncover the identities of all, to oppress multifacetism itself? What better way to bring forth the modern versions of pre-colonial and illegal institutions of sedition, blasphemy, and libel than to still the key clicks of those with information unborne, leaving their truths unwritten?

In my opinion, Real Names is despicable. It intrudes on human freedom. Would Thomas Paine have seen his Common Sense succeed if he could not attribute his work to Ben Franklin, et al? What about literature? Percy Shelley attributed Frankenstein to Mary Shelley, but new research by Scott de Hart demonstrates conclusively that Frankenstein was Percy’s work. Would Real Names have inhibited that monumental work? In my opinion, yes it would have.

Real Names and Identity for Enterprises

Yes, the Internet is a noisy and often disagreeable place, but importantly, it is an environment where truth appears and instantly clears a field of misinformation in one astonishing stroke.

So what does Real Names have to do with business and enterprise computing? Simply this, there are now emerging currencies, texting services, email services, cloud storage and the like, which are anonymous or encrypted in their design. These businesses are growing. They support the user’s desire to encrypt data and allow the silent masses to stay invisible and participate; these services are the vanguard of a better day. The move to law-abiding anonymity is broad-based and without controversy. The appetite for invisibility grows as the power to interfere grows. Smart IT departments will want to be ahead of the curve and recognize that users are choosing tools that afford immunity from the emotional damage of all-seeing eyes.

Businesses that insist on prying people’s many avatars apart as a normal course of business will find their market share growth inhibited and their brands marred. Businesses need to avoid taking sides and give their final customers the final say or be left behind. Playing both sides will see increased business risk.

Kudos to Vint Cerf for setting the record straight on real names. He said that he believed that real names can hurt Google and also users. Right. That makes a mountain of sense. In practice, real names is no different from gun registration. Registration is a necessary prelude to becoming regulated, fleeced, drafted, or genocided. But businesses want to know who they are talking to, and Cerf’s expressed concept that authentication be a vertical model where different kinds of authentication are used for different types of transactions. But Google is in my view disingenuous when it says that it has addressed user complaints about the practice, allowing a few hundred users to use pseudonyms. It’s not vertical enough.

Perhaps it is all innocent and Internet businesses are trying to protect many of their users from exploitation. But events across the world show us that real names-type scenarios can hurt well-meaning people.

At the same time, there are some really bad people out there, and businesses don’t want to be caught short when it comes to protecting both the company and the users. Perhaps a third party authentication service that works for the user would be a good business approach. That way, a vouch-safe service would protect anonymity, reduce user and business risk, and preserve multifacetism.

Zoom Out

Every 500 years or so, Western Civilization undergoes a social transformation. The last one was called the Reformation. Executive overreach, mercantilism, theocracy, education and trade brought it on. Vastly accelerated it was by the Gutenberg printing press. The printing press allowed anyone to print information and opinion anonymously, if they chose. In many societies, then and now, to be revealed as an expositor of disfavored material is a recipe trouble. And even in countries that are purported to be free there are powerful interests that can work to attack the sources of disfavored information.

To force one’s name onto every digital document is to take aim at the Internet Reformation itself, as copyright law was used in the 16th century to do. Real Names can rightly be seen as a company town Stamp Act. There are people who want to stamp your real name onto everything you say on the Internet. More and more people are saying ‘no.” They want to retain their multifacetism. They want to preserve their safety and security to themselves. Smart enterprise IT people will take notice when they design; and decide how they want to work with their customers to support this need; or take brand alienation and business risk down the road.

Since technology is of our own design, we have the capacity to protect human dignity and freedom of thought and expression in our data structures and architectures. Moving away from real names and towards end user freedom to decide on identity will keep Internet oligarchs from gumming up the fountain of their own success.

1 Comments

my comment would be that it is only because of marketing and business that real names matter anywhere. the protocols and the internet have never provided any real privacy, and honestly it is not the government as much as those that have real risk. now in the real world, you have to know who people are, and for that you are you - your dna. i think tightly binding humans on the internet will be problematic for a long time coming, and there is far greater issues outside the us with free speech being disallowed. you can say anything you like on the internet, just remember that if you use free speech arguments, then freedom to listen and know who is speaking depends on how much you believe any argument that is more than philosophical. would you go to a doctor is he was not licensed ...

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